Hugh Cook - The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

Even as the dorgi watched, the globe was changing. It was radiating heat. It was becoming a fireball. Could humans do that? The dorgi hunted through its memory banks. Yes! Humans radiate heat! No! Humans die at fireball heat! Yes! Humans clad in reflective materials dare such heat! No! No! Yes Yes! No no no! Yes!

In desperate doubt, the dorgi consulted its Supreme Directive. This was very simple, and tells us a lot about the Golden Gulag:

1. WHEN IN DOUBT, QUESTION.

2. IF STILL IN DOUBT, TORTURE.

3. IF STILL IN DOUBT, KILL.

4. IF NOW NOT ENTIRELY SATISFIED WITH AREA SECURITY THEN PROCEED WITH AREA DESTRUCTION.

Instantly the dorgi became calm. That was the Law. The dorgi need only follow the Law. Furthermore, it could be as rude and as violent as it wanted to be as long as it did follow the Law. The dorgi had already executed Instruction One. Therefore it must go straight to Instruction Two. This intruder must be tortured!

‘I hear Stogirov,’ said the dorgi, ‘but I see a Shabble. A delinquent Shabble! Imitating a human! You will be escorted to a therapist immediately for interrogation in depth.’

‘There are no therapists,’ said Shabble boldly. ‘They’re all dead.’

‘There is a functional therapist on level 433,’ said the dorgi in tones of ponderous menace.

A dorgi does not lie. A dorgi is a primitive mechanism which is incapable of anything as sophisticated as a fiction. A dorgi is however capable of error. But the possibility of error in this case was vanishingly small. When a dorgi says that a therapist exists then a therapist truly must exist.

‘All right, all right,’ said Shabble, gaining height slowly so as not to alarm the dorgi. ‘I’ll come quietly.’

‘Then descend 934 incas and proceed along the corridor.’ ‘Which corridor?’ said Shabble, rolling slowly through the air toward the blue-lit branch of the Downstairs maze which its prisoners had so recently considered as an escape route.

‘This one!’ said the dorgi. ‘The one we’re in!’

‘Oh, this one!’ said Shabble, accelerating.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the dorgi. ‘But not so fast! And descend! Descend I say! Halt! You are going too fast! Halt or I shoot! Halt! Halt! Halt!’

The dorgi’s alarm klaxon blared. It was the final warning — as Shabble knew full well. Shabble blasted the dorgi with fire hot enough to melt forged steel. The dorgi shrugged off the onslaught — but was momentarily blinded. In that moment, Shabble span furiously, spitting out twenty-seven Shabble-sized fireballs.

The dorgi recovered its powers of sight. It stared dis-believingly at the twenty-eight Shabbies hanging in the air. What the hell was going on here? Well: shoot first, ask questions afterwards! The dorgi opened fire, trying to gun down all twenty-eight Shabbies simultaneously. It was so busy shooting at fireballs that it temporarily forgot about the humans.

The humans were already running.

They sprinted, collided, fell, rolled, scrambled, recovered, ducked, dodged, then threw themselves into the blue-lit side corridor. Behind them, the deafening thunder of the zulzer ruled all. Chunks of plax exploded from the walls. Shabble skidded round the corner into the blue-lit corridor, counted the humans — all seven were there — then urged them to action.

‘Brodirov kanamensky!’

‘What?’ said Zozimus.

‘Shavaunt!’ said Shabble, reverting to Toxteth.

The humans got the hint, and, dizzy and dazed though they were, they started running. Their overlord was pleased to see the one called Arnaut still had tight hold of the wishstone.

In the main corridor, the thunder of the zulzer continued for quite some time. The dorgi only stopped shooting when it had exhausted all its ammunition. It looked for corpses. There were none. Maybe the zulzer had atomised them. Maybe.

‘We’ll see,’ said the dorgi.

It consulted an image-record of its onslaught of the corridor and did a spectral analysis of the same. Unfortunately, spectral analysis indicated that no large carbon-based lifeforms had been destroyed. Also, the Shabble appeared to have escaped.

‘Sinvoco senvoco sabvoco!’ said the dorgi, nearly overloading its obscenity circuits.

The intruders had got clean away.

The dorgi did an Advanced Situational Analysis, grunting at the pain of such intellectual analysis. Then concluded:

‘They' must’ve gone down that side corridor.’

It thundered to the side corridor. Which was too small to admit it. The dorgi did another Advanced Situational Analysis, which was every bit as painful as the first. It concluded:

‘I cannot pursue.’

By now it was in something of a quandry. So it once more consulted its Supreme Directive. Which clearly stated:

4. IF NOT NOW ENTIRELY SATISFIED WITH AREA SECURITY THEN PROCEED WITH AREA DESTRUCTION.

‘Right!’ muttered the dorgi. ‘That does it!’

Swiftly it charged up its Probability Disruptors, highly satisfied with the comforting thought that everything within fifty luzaks would shortly be chonjorted beyond repair.

‘Here goes!’ said the dorgi.

Then Initiated the Probability Disruption.

Nothing happened.

Doubtless the Probability Disruptors were on the fritz.

‘Just my luck,’ muttered the dorgi dourly, and consulted its memory banks, where it eventually located:

Directive 238768138764: Equipment Malfunction.

IN THE EVENT OF A MISSION-CRITICAL EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION SEEK OUT A SUPERVISOR, ROBOTIC, GRADE 7.

The dorgi grunted. Then grunted again. It did not like supervisors. They were intelligent. Worse, they were more intelligent than dorgis. (Most things were.) Still, there was no helping it. A Directive was a Directive. There would be several thousand years of intensive algetic therapy in store for any dorgi rash enough to disobey a Directive.

Grunting and grumbling, the dorgi began to rumble along the corridor, diligently looking for a supervisor. It was going to be looking for a long time, for the last operational supervisor had suffered a terminal malfunction some three thousand years earlier.

Still, such is life.

While the dorgi was busy looking for a supervisor, and Shabble was regrouping Shabble’s prisoner playmates, the conjuror Odolo lay in bed in Ivan Pokrov’s private quarters in the Analytical Institute on the island of Jod. Odolo had collapsed halfway across the harbour bridge, and Uckermark and Chegory had lugged him the rest of the way.

During the battle in the pink palace, Varazchavardan had made a very determined effort to strangle Odolo, and the marks on his throat which evidenced the effort were steadily darkening from slap-smash red to thunder black. Still, Odolo was alive and breathing yet. Uckermark and Chegory sat by ^? the unconscious conjuror’s bedside, discussing him with Ivan Pokrov.

‘You sav he transformed himself?’ said Pokrov.

— w ere not kidding,’ said Chegory. ‘He — he’s a — it was a, like, a nightmare, okay?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pokrov, doing his best to soothe the upright Ebby. ‘So he transformed himself. I believe you!’

'He must be a wizard,’ said Uckermark. ‘Or a sorcerer at the very least.’

‘A wizard,’ said Chegory. ‘They’re at war, aren’t they? Wizards and sorcerers? So he’s a wizard. Else why would he hide his powers?’

‘They’re not exactly at war,’ said Uckermark. ‘Wizards and sorcerers, I mean. They just don’t get on very well.’ Pokrov tried to think of some intelligent contribution he could make to this debate, but failed. He was used to dealing with life, death and the universe in terms of mathematical theory, but had no satisfactory theoretical explanation for magic. This is scarcely surprising, for even Thaldonian Mathematics fails to provide a Predictive Paradigm to explain those processes which the researchers of the Golden Gulag were in the habit of describing as Synergetic Improbability.